W M Keck Foundation

The largest private grant ever awarded for a scientific project--$70 million to build the 400-inch Keck Telescope--is by far the largest ever contributed by the Los Angeles-based W. M. Keck Foundation. The foundation, one of the nation's richest, was established in 1954 by William Keck, founder of Superior Oil Co. Since Keck's death in 1964, the foundation has grown in value to about $500 million, aided in large part by Mobil Corp.'s acquisition of Superior Oil last year. Howard B.

The School of Education at Cal State Northridge will receive a $125,000 grant to improve methods of teaching science and mathematics to aspiring and working teachers, campus officials said. The grant from the W. M. Keck Foundation is to establish a teaching and research laboratory that will be used by about 500 education students and working teachers each year, officials said.

The W. M. Keck Foundation has donated $10 million in grant money to help redesign St. Johns Hospital and Health Center in Santa Monica, where inpatient services have been halted since the facility was severely damaged in the January earthquake. For the past seven months, the 501-bed facility offered outpatient care while the hospital's Main and South wings are being repaired. Those wings are scheduled to reopen Oct. 3, with 233 beds.

* Cal Lutheran University received a $500,000 grant from the W.M. Keck Foundation to enhance its science program. The grant provides funding for new equipment and a networking infrastructure for scientific applications in microscopy, modeling and data acquisition and analysis. The Los Angeles-based foundation, started by the late Superior Oil Co. founder W.M. Keck, is one of the largest philanthropic organizations in the nation.

Nowadays Big Science requires Big Money. Recognizing that fact, the W. M. Keck Foundation has come up with a $70-million gift to Caltech to build the world's largest optical telescope, a 10-meter (400-inch) instrument that will enable astronomers to peer farther into the universe and further back in time than ever before. Because the universe is expanding, the farther away an object is, the longer ago it was created.

The W. M. Keck Foundation has bestowed a $600,000 grant on KCET Channel 28 to pay for the acquisition of "Sesame Street," "The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour" and other national programs, and to buy a new 24-track audio console, the station said Wednesday. The foundation, established by the late founder of the Superior Oil Co., has been a strong supporter of KCET in recent years.

Foundations play a role in setting social policy by their choices of organizations and programs to fund. The following list briefly describes the gift patterns of California's top foundations. They are ranked by grants given in a year, not by assets or endowments. William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Menlo Park Grants given for calendar year 1989: $39.5 million.

Hoping to elevate USC's School of Medicine into the top tier of the nation's medical schools, the W.M. Keck Foundation plans to donate $110 million to build research labs, hire preeminent faculty and provide student scholarships. In recognition of the gift, the largest ever to a medical school, USC today will publicly rename the school after William Myron Keck, the founder of Superior Oil Co. who went on to establish one of America's largest philanthropic organizations.

There is in horse racing today only one breeder with a chance to win the 1986 Triple Crown. He is Howard B. Keck of Los Angeles, a retired oilman whose hobby for the last half-century has been creating things that go fast. Animate things or inanimate, four-legged, or four-wheeled, it doesn't much matter. His bag is the engineering. Three years ago, Keck created the horse that won the Kentucky Derby earlier this month under a 54-year-old rider, Bill Shoemaker.

Waldemar Nielsen studies reverse alchemy. That's what happens when entrepreneurs give away their gold to finance leaden ideas. Nielsen, who is widely regarded in foundation circles as America's preeminent philanthropic critic, is fascinated by how men whose bold actions create great wealth often turn into wimps when it comes to giving their money away. "Big money for small ideas," Nielsen says about the state of foundation grant making in America.